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Your Path to a $16B exit? Build a J2ME App

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Re: Your Path to a $16B exit? Build a J2ME App

#191

Post by marincounty »

avenger123 wrote: post #155

The message of the article is good but it's not seeing the forest from the trees. Having just read the Forbes artcile on the company and Jan in particular, some interesting things stood out: 1) Jan had money to start and was able to take time to build a user base and find the real value in the App and didn't need to go around "raising money". The SMS component of the app wasn't the initial focus. The company didn't n…

"Instead of spending that $100 on the get together every other night save it. Build your skills." --if I didn't spend so much on chasing tail; I could have retired at 30. Honetly! And yes pathetic, but you are only young once.

Re: Your Path to a $16B exit? Build a J2ME App

#192

Post by tim333 »

vishnugupta wrote: post #53
acchow wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Low end Android phones are approaching feature phones in price.

They are already cheaper than feature phones! At least in India : http://tinyurl.com/la5g2ou

That link appears to show the cheapest Android phone at R 2699 and the cheapest feature phone at R 699. I'm not sure that fits your point.

Re: Your Path to a $16B exit? Build a J2ME App

#193

Post by gst »

r00fus wrote: post #189
antirez wrote: post #173

The j2me is just a piece of "it just works". 1) Covers a huge amount of devices. Yep, because j2me, but also because what could be the top-1 competitor, Apple iMessage, can't inter-operate between Apple and Android devices (very stupid tactic, it will get marginalized). 2) Does not require an account, so it is not bound to Facebook, Twitter, ... You may ask, what's the problem with having an account? That you capture…

> Apple iMessage, can't inter-operate between Apple and Android devices (very stupid tactic, it will get marginalized). Apple's iMessage works fine with Android in the western developed world where you can get unlimited/cheap SMS. Also android support won't help iMessage in markets like India where there are very very many feature (j2me) phones out there. Apple and WhatsApp have different goals. FB is far more threat…

> Apple's iMessage works fine with Android in the western developed world where you can get unlimited/cheap SMS.

No, it doesn't. It works in simple cases as long as none of the iMessage participants invites someone else into the conversation and starts a group conversation. Once that happens you can only participate in the conversation if you have an actual iMessage client.

Re: Your Path to a $16B exit? Build a J2ME App

#195

Post by skinnymuch »

dba7dba wrote: post #190
yen223 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same up here in Malaysia. In fact, it's starting to look like the only places that isn't dominated by WhatsApp are America and China.

You forgot china/Skorea/Japan, all big markets. WeChat - china S Korea - kakaotalk 90% market share LINE - Japan 50 million users with 300 million worldwide And all three have significant revenue in double digit US millions a year, unlike WhatsApp which has no real revenue...

Whatsapp has revenue in the double digit US millions per year. Their profit might even be in that range.

Re: Your Path to a $16B exit? Build a J2ME App

#196

Post by michaelbuckbee »

zyb09 wrote: post #185
antirez wrote: post #173

The j2me is just a piece of "it just works". 1) Covers a huge amount of devices. Yep, because j2me, but also because what could be the top-1 competitor, Apple iMessage, can't inter-operate between Apple and Android devices (very stupid tactic, it will get marginalized). 2) Does not require an account, so it is not bound to Facebook, Twitter, ... You may ask, what's the problem with having an account? That you capture…

I agree, this is the real reason WhatsApp took off so quickly. Especially that it automatically uses your phone number as account-id and then goes through your address book to automatically populate your WhatsApp contact list. No other Instant Messenger did that. It was always: Create account, exchange account-ids, add to contact list. This adds huge amounts of friction for a new service, and WhatsApp sidestepped thi…

Fairly sure Viber did the same thing.

Re: Your Path to a $16B exit? Build a J2ME App

#197

Post by TWAndrews »

sspiff wrote: post #134
merloen wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The EU is a $16.5T economy, most of it on the internet, vastly underserved by internet companies compared to the U.S. Even Facebook was English only until 2008. Big business opportunities are being missed there.

The smorgasbord of languages and cultures makes it harder to target though. But German, French and Spanish markets are big in their own right, especially if you consider you can reach other territories with them as well. (Austria, Switzerland and to some extent eastern Europe with German; Canada and much of connected Africa with French; Phillipines and Latin America with Spanish.)

And most of the most appealing-to-business sub-populations in a lot of these countries read english well enough that an English-language product captures a lot of them.

Re: Your Path to a $16B exit? Build a J2ME App

#198

Post by aryastark »

adventured wrote: post #135
keerthiko wrote: post #69

This. This is the answer I have always looked for. > "But, but, how is WhatsApp any different than iMessage / Facebook Messenger / Hangouts?" I have made this exclamation multiple times, and my friends in India and Singapore and other parts of Asia just turned up their palms with a "I dunno, everyone uses it and told me to get it." I refused to use it since I like to use as few messaging platforms as possible (just G…

"how is WhatsApp any different than iMessage / Facebook Messenger / Hangouts?" That's not the right question to begin with. The right question on this is: are those instant messenger users on WhatsApp worth much financially, will they ever produce financial returns, such that you justify $19 billion in any respect. I say no, the value of messenger bytes is nearly zero unless you can hold the users hostage and extract…

I agree. You have people out there like Marc Andreessen comparing SnapChat to Tencent and saying it's potentially worth $100B or so. These people are off their goddamn meds. They are pure vulture capitalists, and poor mom and dad out in Nebraska are going to get stuck carrying this stinking mess when their 401k inevitably implodes.

You want to see how much eyeballs are worth, look at reddit. They are pretty much a corporate charity, with their reddit gold scam going on.

When people get accustomed to not paying for things, they don't pay for things. I'm not going to pay for a newspaper when I can read it all online. And yet, I'll happily go to dinner one night a week and spend more than it costs for an entire year's subscription to the local newspaper.

WhatsApp is $1 a year. That's great if you're running with a few hundred employees and have such a massive user base. That's doing more than okay, in my book. But $19B? You're not getting that back. Certainly not in any timeframe that matters. Because what's hot today will not be what's hot 5 years from now. We all know that. It's how the tech industry works.

Re: Your Path to a $16B exit? Build a J2ME App

#199

Post by laurentb »

Pxtl wrote: post #181
laurentb wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can only imagine the nightmare of manually selecting subreddits for each languages though!

Subreddits have a "language" setting, although the data is probably dirty since the value is unused AFAIK - for all we know /r/pics is currently set on "Klingon". The Reddit admins would probably have to do some manual dirty-work, but iirc the "default subs/front page" reddit listing is somewhat manually curated anyways.

either way, if you stick to the idea of an entirely french version, fr.reddit.com/r/football will lead you to the american football subreddit, but for a french guy they would expect soccer to be there...

It's still gread that they provided a multilingual UI, but as a whole, us companies could always use to understand the foreign market a little bit better than just providing a UI translation...

Re: Your Path to a $16B exit? Build a J2ME App

#200

Post by johnward »

ltorresv wrote: post #183
acchow wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Low end Android phones are approaching feature phones in price.

Everybody is missing the point in this discussion. While devices might be affordable, the real problem is service. In most countries you can get a cheap android indeed but having a data plan is really expensive or it's just not possible because of how plans are structured. The iPhone was in part revolutionary because it came along with a $30 data plan as an obligatory add on. Before that you had to be in the most exp…

I was going to ask this. They have feature phones because they can't get the data plans. Some of these people don't have electricity at home but they still have feature phones. That market is insanely huge for mobile advertising.
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